Safety Last

Safety Last – Viewed in a properly restored transfer, Harold Lloyd’s 1923 Safety Last is briskly effective and weirdly abstract.  About forty percent of the film is devoted to images of Lloyd scaling a twelve-story building and encountering various perils along the way.  There is a Hemingway-like sensibility at work here:  if you want to know how to clamber over cornices and scramble up the escarpment of a brick wall, this film seems to objectively show you how this might be done.  Safety Last is not particularly funny although it has some good gags – particularly in the first half of the picture which is devoted to setting up the various plot contrivances required for the death-defying skyscraper sequence.  The film is more inventive and thrilling than comic; when humor fails, go for peril and spectacle – this has been a strategy used in the movie business since its inception.  When a film like The Blues Brothers  or 1941 flagged, the director ladled in car chases and big slapstick explosions:  it’s a film formula that always works, more or less, and Lloyd was one of the pioneers of this kind of comedy.  A valuable aspect of this kind of picture is its stark, and unforgiving, character.   Two of the great themes motivating silent comedy are poverty and desperation.  In Safety Last, Harold Lloyd is first seen behind prison bars, despairing, in the company of a clergyman – an image that is derived from Griffith’s Intolerance (the plot involving a convict condemned to death).  Lloyd’s shifts the camera’s perspective and the image turns out to be a gag – the bespectacled youth is on a train platform departing from his hometown, Great Bend, to travel to the big city – but, nonetheless, the aura of dire extremity persists throughout the picture.  In the city, the kid gets a job as a salesclerk in a haute monde department store, selling cloth to variously monstrous society matrons.  But he is very poor and can not even afford the rent in the squalid flat where he lives with his buddy, a kind of human fly gifted with the ability to climb skyscrapers to avoid unfortunate encounters with persecuting cops.  The kid pretends that he’s successful, although he’s barely scraping by, and, then, when his fiancée comes from Great Bend, must bluff that he is the head of the department store.  To earn some money, he contrives a scheme to have his buddy clamber up the 12 story department store façade, a stately structure that looks something like Louis Sullivan’s Wainwright building.  Trouble ensues – the buddy gets pursued by a belligerent and sadistic cop, and Lloyd ends up climbing the skyscraper himself despite the fact that he is clumsy and afraid of heights.  The movie is austere and the skyscraper climb, although apparently performed on three-story mock-ups using trick photography, is remarkably convincing and, even, frightening.  Integral to these kind of Hal Roach films are the backdrops:  the desolate alleyways and commercial districts of the anonymous big city, the muddy gutters and sidewalks, the barren suburbs full of half-finished buildings, the tram lines zigzagging across broad, sun-blasted streets and the crowds of idlers watching the cops beat a suspect, the guffawers and henpecked husbands and savage Hausfrauen, the pigeons and dogs from the early Twenties sallying forth to persecute the hapless hero.